Anna Webber wrote the piece that opens Unseparate in 2020, during the stretch when nobody knew if a room full of horn players would ever be allowed to exist again. She wasn't thinking about tuning theory so much as a feeling: “What would be the most joyful thing to play when we're in a room together?” Her answer was big, resonant chords, built from just intonation rather than the equal temperament every other instrument in the room was built to play.
That piece, ‘Just Intonation Etudes for Big Band’, anchors Unseparate, the second album from the Webber/Morris Big Band, the eighteen-piece ensemble Webber co-leads with fellow saxophonist and composer Angela Morris. Released on 26 September 2025 through Out Of Your Head Records, it follows Both Are True, their acclaimed 2020 debut, which turned up on year-end lists from the New York Times, Bandcamp Daily and the NPR Jazz Critics Poll.
Big bands are not supposed to sound like this.
Just intonation tunes intervals to pure, whole-number ratios rather than equal temperament's evenly split octave, and mixing the two inside an eighteen-piece band is a genuinely difficult trick — most of the ensemble reads pitch the conventional way, while smaller groupings bend toward the purer, stranger harmony underneath. It's the same collision Webber explored on her own 2023 record Shimmer Wince, whose title captures both effects: certain chords shimmer, others make you wince. Here the friction becomes a four-part arc, moving from the nervy pulse of ‘Pulse’ through the searching dialogue of ‘Timbre’ to ‘Metaphor’, where a stately theme dissolves into otherworldly harmony and free improvisation.
The album's other tracks stretch the idea further, drawing, as the pair put it, on minimalism, pop and noise as much as on big-band tradition. The personnel reads like a cross-section of New York's creative-music scene — trumpeter Kenny Warren, pianist Marta Sánchez, vibraphonist Yuhan Su and trombonist Reginald Chapman among them — musicians equally fluent in reading dense charts and abandoning them.
Webber, who now co-chairs jazz studies at the New England Conservatory, and Morris, a Toronto-trained composer who also leads the vocal project Rallidae, formed the band in 2015 out of a shared frustration with what a big band was assumed to sound like. Unseparate makes the case, ten years on, that the format still has room to be reinvented rather than preserved.
